Beginning with the basics

I11

I like Food not Bombs because I think that having food and...sharing food is... one of the most...basic things. If we can do that then we can do everything else...or we can work towards doing everything else for ourselves too.

A new party

I16

I think there has to be a new party. I think there has to be a new communist party, that's what I think. We see that we're not able to get legislation in this province to protect workers in the workplace. We see that we have something in the order of one in eight children living below the poverty level and families not having enough food to eat. I don't think this can be solved by tinkering around the edges and sending in a social worker. We need to have some kind of spirited organization that is going to consistently fight.

Whiteness and the limits to movements

I19

[What are the] conversations that need to be had? Well...there's the race conversation. Not that that conversation doesn't happen but I don't think it happens in a way that ever gets anywhere near to addressing the issue. It kind of happens in this...massaging white guilt kind of way - we're talking about it...but it never actually gets addressed at all. I think that's a major issue locally….I think there's the whiteness of our movements and then there's racism in Halifax and where the activist community fits in to addressing that. I think that's a conversation that needs to be had that isn't because I think it very much limits what groups can do and what organizing can accomplish in the city...

Indigenous knowledge

I7

You learn about history and all the really bad stuff that has happened, to the Indigenous population particularly, and I was like, wow, what keeps people motivated there?...if human society is going to get through what we're going through now, it's going to be because of the knowledge of indigenous peoples. I feel like there's that wealth of knowledge there that's just not tapped in the mainstream and it's the total opposite of the dominant culture.

The limits of success

I20

I think that what makes us successful is also our weakness. We are super successful at a certain kind of advocacy work and a certain kind of change work but...in some ways having a lot of credibility with government, with media, in the case of some of our campaigns with industry in fact means that we are not as open or part explicitly of wider change movements or wider justice movements. So...our success in one area limits our ability to be a real agent for wider change, so I think that's a barrier in the long term if not necessarily right now.

The politics of fear

I22

When people are insecure, when people think there is instability, and they feel atomized like we feel in this society, then anybody who can guarantee security and stability will receive their support, including the far right. Even intelligent people who you would think would have left wing positions would adopt that because when it comes to insecurity and stability...people want to opt for security and stability.

Violence, clarity, and context

I19

Diversity of tactics - really what it boils down to is black bloc versus no black bloc and that...gets turned into violence versus non-violence [but] they don't line up. I think starting with a definition of what is violence, and what is the black bloc, and where does it fit on the spectrum of violence, and what's the particular advantages and disadvantages of a black bloc, and taking that out of the conversation of violence versus non-violence because it's not the same question as far as I'm concerned. Equating those things doesn't make any sense to me. When I think of violence...in social movements [I think of] revolutionary wars or something [like that] which has no bearing [on] what's happening in our context at the moment. So what do I think of violence? I think it's certainly justified and necessary in cases of self-defense.

Reconsidering the end goals

I31

We need to change the end goal. Is the end goal about economic growth and increasing wealth or is the end goal...human well-being and quality of life? There is a really rich discourse around those things - gross national happiness and genuine progress indicators and those sorts of things. It's not enough just to do the academic research and come up with these ideas, there has to be direct correlations within the politics.

Engaging the system

I3

I do believe that...there's not much difference between political parties that are offered to us. For example, the Conservative Party that is in power right now is so far right that it is shifting the cultural paradigm in Canada, right now, to the right, I think more than any other party has done so far and I think that's really dangerous and that affects many people concretely. All the social programs that are cut, all the policy changes that are happening at different levels, for example immigration, that has concrete immediate effect[s] on many people who are marginalized and have very little influence in our society and have a serious lack of security. So engaging with the political system that we have now in terms of achieving imperfect...short, term goals that have a concrete, immediate impact on people I think is important.

Selling people short

I19

Personally I'm really critical of [the belief that] in order to mobilize people [you] have [to] appeal to the lowest common denominator. I think that really sells people short….If we take the G8 organizing [in the] spring [of 2010], I remember being at a meeting and someone said using the slogan ‘stop globalization: another world is possible’ was too political and they had to take ‘stop globalization’ out of the slogan. It's just kind of, like, really? I mean the reality is not that many people are going to come out to this protest anyways, do you have to make it so watered down? It's a watered down slogan as it is but to water it down even more to be just ‘another world is possible’ it just doesn't make any sense to me.